Saturday, April 22, 2017

PZ Myers' Potty Mouth Proves Behe Right (or Mushroom Stories)

Years ago, in a court opinion stolen straight from the ACLU's amicus brief, Judge Jones the III claimed that ID could not be science because the ID scientists had not yet done the work in the lab of showing by experiment what natural selection could not do.

Later Michael Behe would criticize Judge Jones' opinion on the grounds (among others) that that sort of lab work, while important, would produce results which would be simply be dismissed by critics as a failure to find the right conditions for evolution.

(13) As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it.(P-718; 18:125-27 (Behe); 22:102-06 (Behe)).
If I conducted such an experiment and no flagellum were evolved, what Darwinist would believe me? What Darwinist would take that as evidence for my claims that Darwinism is wrong and ID is right?

Prophetic! Douglas Axe and Anne Gauger worked out just such an experiment, and only a prophet could have anticipated the response by the true believers in adaptationism.

Myers' argument gone to pot

At Panda's Thumb, P.Z. Myers dismisses Axe and Gauger's results as having a flawed protocol and points to a paper criticized in their work as succeeding where they failed:

Gauger and Axe are saying, "Ooh, we sh** in a pot and we couldn't even get mushrooms to grow in it,". . .